All Features articles – Page 260
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Features
Heading for a crowded retirement
Bent Nyløkke Jørgensen stood down as chief executive of PKA in Denmark at the end of 2001 and has since carried out a number of tasks, including chairing the Jørgensen committee, a working party to draw up recommendations on pension fund governance for the Danish government What was your ...
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Features
RBC ousts SocGen in R&M custody survey
RBC Global Services has knocked Société Générale from the top in a widely-watched survey of global custodians organised by R&M Consultants. RBC, second last year, forced last year’s leader into second place. Mellon Group came in third, from seventh – ousting Pictet, which has slipped to fifth. One of the ...
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Features
Dealing with today's sharply increasing OPEB liabilities
The time may be right for employers to develop strategies for managing health benefits for retirees – so-called ‘other post-employment benefits’ (OPEB). Several factors are responsible for OPEB’s emergence as a major issue for employers. OPEB has become a significant operating statement cost and balance sheet liability. According to data ...
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Features
Eking out extra returns
Melissa Brown, managing director and senior portfolio manager of the quantitative equity group at Goldman Sachs Asset Management (GSAM), says there has been a lot of interest among pension funds in many different markets for enhanced indexation products in the last year or so. She cites several reasons for the ...
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Features
Equities' Jekyll and Hyde
The Dutch asset management house Robeco last year announced that it was launching its first value fund, benchmarked to the MSCI World Value Index and investing solely in undervalued securities. The significance of this is that Robeco has a strong tradition of growth investing. Its Rolinco fund is a pure ...
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Features
Real estate has proven its worth
It is that time of year again. Numbers have been crunched, figures analysed, reports prepared. Trustees have received information on the year just gone and for most it has not been too bad. In the UK and US, equities outperformed bonds. Okay, in much of continental Europe this was not ...
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Features
Retirement programmes: extreme makeover
With his mandate re-affirmed, Bush has prioritised two ambitious goals within the ‘ownership society’ – privatising social security and revamping the private pension system. Such boldness is not rhetorical: Bush’s previous term demonstrated a commitment to his fundamental agenda. The President has not previously shied from audacity; having been re-elected, ...
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Features
Finding a niche idea
Few European asset managers can boast the pedigree of the Swiss investment manager Pictet Asset Management. Pictet is the affiliate of banking group Pictet & Cie, one of the oldest private banks in Switzerland and currently celebrating 200 years in the money management business. Age brings wisdom, and one of ...
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Features
Sophisticated Finns reap returns
In investment terms, Finland forms part of the Nordic region. As such, therefore, it is one of the most sophisticated European countries in relation to the private equity market.Finland invested 0.307% of its GDP in private equity in 2003, the last year for which figures are available from the European ...
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Features
Managers: focus on return
Last year US pension funds’ median return was 11.7% for corporate and 12.5% for public funds, according to Russell Mellon universes performance data – a good result. But it is the legacy of the past five years that has done the damage, with annual returns averaging just 3.6% for corporate ...
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Features
Shaping tomorrow's hedge funds
The writer Mark Twain memorably pronounced that reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. Today he could be suggesting a similar sentiment about hedge funds. Overall trends suggest hedge funds are here to stay. Consider that the average hedge fund had its 17th consecutive positive year in 2004, showing a ...
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Features
Still waiting for the future
By far the most important development in the Belgian pensions market has been the provisions for industry-wide pension schemes set out in the Vandenbroucke Law which came into effect at the beginning of last year. The main aim of the law – to boost second-pillar pension provision by creating industry-wide ...
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Features
Sorting the sheep from the goats
The Gothenburg-based Andra AP-fonden (AP2), one of the national ‘buffer’ funds of Sweden’s pension system, took the unusual step last year of terminating 16 of its domestic and European equity mandates at one stroke. This bold move was part of a strategic decision to draw a clearer distinction between the ...
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Features
The search for the holy grail
The Capital Asset Pricing Model of financial theory is the root of the Alpha, Beta distinction. This model is shown below: where R is the return from respectively the portfolio and market, alpha and beta the objects of interest and epsilon a residual error term. This is a simple linear ...
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Features
Lego: piecing it together
When the founder of the Lego company, Ole Kirk Christiansen, came up with the brand name, he was apparently unaware that it means ‘I put together’ in Latin. It is appropriate in this context as that is exactly what the company, based in Billund, Denmark, has been doing recently with ...
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Features
Where the long-run returns lie
Markets are volatile, with much variation in year-to-year returns: we need long time series to make inferences. The periods we examine must be long enough to incorporate the good, the bad and the indifferent times. In this article we provide an update on long-run returns on stocks, bonds, bills, and ...
